Check out Charles’ latest Freeman article, this one on the healthcare debate.
(The title of this blog post comes from a piece by Richard Mitchell.)
A People’s History of Pandora, Part 2
Libertarians are divided on Avatar (which I haven’t seen yet); check out Peter Suderman, Stephan Kinsella, Peter Klein, David Kramer, and Lester Hunt.
Lester writes, inter alia:
What makes the business corporation in this movie so evil? Well, it engages in the following practices: using military force to invade and conquer foreign lands, slaughtering wholesale numbers of the inhabitants and burning their dwellings, all in order to steal their property. … Gee, I thought, I can’t think of a single business corporation that engages in those particular practices. Office Depot doesn’t, and I’m pretty sure Microsoft and Dell Inc don’t either.
So in the comments section I responded:
I can’t think of many businesses that engage in those particular practices all on their own. But I can think of plenty of businesses that have either gotten governments to engage in those practices on their behalf (examples range from the East India Company to the United Fruit/Brands Company) or have themselves engaged in those practices on some government’s behalf (e.g. Blackwater, DynCorp).
Agreement in Judgments
This program that guesses what person, real or fictional, you’re thinking of (CHT Neil Gaiman) is pretty eerie until you figure out how it works. (Hint: it will get more and more accurate over time.)
Against Pseudo-Reform
MoveOn has a petition opposing the healthcare bill on the grounds that it’s a giveaway to insurance companies. I signed for the heck of it, though I suspect their approach to improving the bill might diverge in some particulars from mine.
The Check Is Not In the Mail
According to this story (CHT LRC), the first check (or cheque) in England was written in 1659.
Clearly this is false. Nobody would have accepted the first check; indeed, nothing even counts as “writing a check” except against the background of an established practice of check-writing.
Hence there could never have been a first check. And that leaves us only two options.
Either the practice of check-writing must stretch back to infinity – which in turn means that the creationists and the evolutionists are both wrong, and Aristotle is right: the universe and the human race are infinitely old, and we’ve been writing checks forever – or else there has never yet been a check, and all experience to the contrary is an illusion.
Healthcare Con
The following letter appeared in this morning’s Opelika-Auburn News:
To the editor:
To understand the current debate over healthcare, one needs to see past the rhetoric of both parties and look at the policies they actually enact.
Republicans promise to protect us against big government, while Democrats promise to protect us against big business.
But in practice, both parties consistently support a partnership between big government and big business, at the expense of ordinary people. They bicker over which partner is to be dominant; but neither party ever seriously threatens the overall partnership.
The healthcare bill is a case in point.
Democrats have portrayed it as an assault on the power of insurance companies – as if those companies won’t benefit enormously from a provision requiring everyone to buy health insurance (with or without the public option).
The Republicans, for their part, portray their defense of the status quo as a defense of the free market. But the status quo in healthcare is no free market; it’s a system of massive, ongoing government intervention on behalf of insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, and the medical establishment.
Democrats and Republicans disagree only over the precise flavor of intervention, not the amount. The question is always whether decisions about your healthcare should be made by bureaucrats, or instead by plutocrats – never by you.
A century ago, a vibrant system of health cooperatives, run not by bureaucrats or plutocrats but by the working class, was dramatically reducing healthcare prices and boosting patient autonomy – until government regulation shut the system down. (University of Alabama history professor David Beito documents the story in his book From Mutual Aid to the Welfare State.)
If Republicans really care about free markets, and if Democrats really care about the poor, why doesn’t either party work to repeal those laws and allow the cooperative system to return?
Roderick T. Long
Further reading: See my How Government Solved the Healthcare Crisis, Poison As Food, Poison As Antidote, and Remembering Corporate Liberalism; Kevin Carson’s Meet the New Healthcare Boss and Honest Statism Beats a Fake Free Market; and Gary Chartier’s State Socialism and Anarchism: How Far They Agree and Wherein They Differ Regarding Healthcare Reform.